Impact of the Civil War

An acute food shortage struck Turkestan in 1918-19, the result of the
civil war, scarcities of grain caused by communist cotton-cultivation
and price-setting policies, and the Tashkent Soviet's disinclination to
provide famine relief to indigenous Central Asians. No authoritative
estimate of famine deaths is available, but Central Asian nationalists
put the number above 1 million.

In the fall of 1919, the collapse of the anti-Bolshevik White Army in
western Siberia enabled General Mikhail Frunze to lead Red Army forces
into Central Asia and gradually occupy the entire region. In 1920 the
Red Army occupied Bukhoro and drove out the amir, declaring an
independent people's republic but remaining as an occupation force.
Turkestan, including the northern part of present-day Tajikistan, was
officially incorporated into the Russian Soviet Federated Socialist
Republic in 1921.

By 1921 the Russian communists had won the Russian Civil War and
established the first Soviet republics in Azerbaijan, Armenia,
Belorussia (present-day Belarus), Georgia, and Ukraine. At this point,
the communists reduced the party's token Central Asian leadership to
figurehead positions and expelled a large number of the Central Asian
rank and file. In 1922 the Communist Party of Bukhoro was incorporated
into the Russian Communist Party, which soon became the Communist Party
of the Soviet Union (CPSU). Thereafter, most major government offices in
Bukhoro were filled by appointees sent from Moscow, many of them Tatars,
and many Central Asians were purged from the party and the government.
In 1924 Bukhoro was converted from a people's republic to a Soviet
socialist republic.